Q. I'm starting to have a lot of projects that are overwhelming the solution. I tried looking for some sort of hierarchical grouping mechanism like a folder, but couldn't find one. Is there anyway to organize these messy solutions?

Asked by Grant BlahaErath. Answered by the Wonk on March 18, 2003

A.

Unfortunately, as of the release candidate of VS.NET 2003 (which supports .NET 1.1), the answer to that question is still "no." Luckily, the user responsiveness of a solution with lots of projects is better in the latest version, but there's still no way to group projects into hierarchies.

Instead, I recommend breaking up groups of related projects between different solutions. I find that multiple copies of VS.NET loaded on separate solutions to be very efficient and very easy to deal with.

How I Figured This Out

It took me a long time to get used to how VS.NET does things, but once I did, I really grew to like it. I figured how to projects and solutions are organized by building a bunch of dummy projects and solutions and seeing how I could relate them with Project References, different folder placement, multiple solutions pointing at the same projects, etc. The results of this experimentation (and the experimentation of Ian Griffths and Jon Flanders) resulted in Mastering Visual Studio .NET from O'Reilly & Associates. Some of what made it into the book (and some more that didn't), I keep on my site as a list of some cool VS.NET tips & tricks.